Obsession: Tales of Irresistible Desire (29 page)

. . . Ha.

I thought about her all day. I even tried calling her but all I got was my Duo plus: “Hi, this is Sean, all calls gratefully received, except those from Jeffrey Archer or Noel Edmonds . . . ”

“Lou? Are you there? Pick up the phone.”

I left the office as early as I could and caught the tube back to Belsize Park, having to wait an agonizing time at Camden for the Edgware connection, which was late due to I don’t fucking know— litter on the line, driver claustrophobia, lack of application.

She was still in bed when I got back. I heated a bowl of celery soup in the microwave and fed it to her, remembering too late that she despised celery. And what else? Beetroot? She didn’t seem to mind now though, her belly grateful for anything to mop up the misery in which it was dissolving. The early February sky shuttered out the light in gray grades across my wall; she became more beautiful as darkness mired her features.

She sat up against the headboard, the duvet slipping away from her body. She didn’t attempt to cover herself. I gave her a T-shirt.

“What happened?” I asked, lighting a candle—she wouldn’t have appreciated the harshness of a bare bulb.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s like I described earlier. I feel as if I’ve been gnawed away from the inside. For a while, I thought it was cancer.”

I bit down on my suggestion that it still might be; the candle’s uncertain light sucked the gaunt angles of her face and shoulders into chiaroscuro.

“Lie with me,” she said.

My sleep was fitful; I was expecting her to murmur something that would shape the formless panic I was barely managing to fasten inside. I lay awake listening to horses clatter lazily up Primrose Hill Road at five a.m., trying to delve for conversations we’d had, or pregnant pauses stuffed with meaning. All I could remember was the sound of her crying.

I nipped outside at around seven, when she was stirring, to the baker’s for croissants. I picked up a pot of jam and the newspaper, a pint of milk and headed back to the flat. Only gone ten minutes, it was some surprise to find her showered and dressed, lying on the bed and listening to one of my Radiohead albums. “We’ll go out after brekkie,” she said. ”You can show me around Camden.”

“How are you feeling?” I asked, unwrapping the croissants and offering her a knife.

“Better.” She broke off a corner of bread and chewed it, dipping her next bit into the virgin surface of the jam, getting crumbs in there. That was something that pissed me off no end when we were together. It didn’t bother me now. Maturity, I suppose. She looked at me slyly, as if she were testing me; I ignored it.

“It’s good to see you, Louise,” I said. “Really.”

“It was a beautiful letter. How could I not answer it?”

“I didn’t necessarily expect to see you on my doorstep . . . you know, a letter, a phone call or something, to let me know how you were.”

“It was an invocation, Sean.”

“A what?”

“I said, it was an invitation. You called to me, I was on the brink. Your timing was immaculate.” She raised an eyebrow. “It always was.”

Camden was pinned down under a grimy, stifling sky. Drawing breath was like sucking exhaust fumes through a burning electric blanket. She leaned against me as we threaded through its unfriendly streets, funneled into passageways and alleys pumping with sound and people.

“This is wild!” she laughed, the plum gash of her mouth halving the pallid remains of her face, once so fleshy and pinkish; at once she looked both like the most alive and the most enervated person and in Camden that was saying something. She looked synthetic, the skin too tight, as if it might split and waft the smell of plastic toys over me. But her eyes had lost their initial vagueness, fastening on individual blurs of color as it all streamed past us, like a hawk tracking is dinner. The whites were so clear they were almost blue.

We tooled up and down the main drag, trying on sunglasses and hats. She fingered jewelry and squeezed the arms of thick sweaters, which made me feel even hotter. I pointed out the egg-tipped folly of GM-TV and she scoffed when I told her it was a listed building. I showed her where I’d seen Adam Ant handing over some coins to a charity collector as we crossed the walkway over the Grand Union Canal into a tight knot of stalls and alcoves. The heat was building up here; candles were sagging on their displays and the drifts of antiques shone dully in a solid mass of bronzed light. Every time Louise brushed against me or held on to my arm, I sagged, as if she were transmitting weight through her touch. At such moments, she would perk up and become animated, trying on hats or mugging in smeared mirrors, laughing as my face grew greasy and pale.

The stream of people was endless. The pavements were so obstructed, pedestrians spilled into the road, slowing the traffic which began to trail back toward Mornington Crescent Tube. The crowds seemed to be swelling, like a single bloated body, inflated by sore tempers and the ceaseless, airless heat. I pulled Louise into a café, worried by a mild panic that had transmitted itself into an hallucination of us crushed beneath a stampede of bodies as they attempted to escape their stifling skins. I bought cappuccino, hoping I could relax sufficiently at the counter before she noticed my discomfort.

When I turned round, Louise was bathed in sunshine. Because of the angle of her chair and the way the sunlight was blocked by the weirdly squashed conglomeration of buildings, only she was favored by its color. It invaded the thick pile of her hair, seeming to imbue each filament, like one of those carbon fiber lamps. It moved across her face like thick fluid and, somehow, seemed of her too, picking out the configuration of her bones slouched inside their fleshy housing, curled into the chair. A comma of wet sunshine touched her lower lip and I found myself wishing I could kiss it away. I still wanted her, even after such a long time had passed. No time at all. Everyone around her seemed to diminish, shadows on the wane, growing sluggish like figures trapped in tar. And then she looked at me. For a moment, I wasn’t sure what kind of fire it was that filled her eyes, certain only that it wasn’t human but then the moment passed, and she smiled and everyone was a component of the greater animation around us once more. She just seemed like a willowy girl, lost in the scrum. Unremarkable.

“Get this down you,” I said, pushing across her coffee. “It’ll put hairs on your chest.”

“This place, Camden that is, reminds me of my last few years,” Louise said, furring her top lip with the froth of her cappuccino. “I don’t know why, really. Something about the way everything feels sad and unreal but is all disguised by movement. I bet this place seems more like its true self when the shops close and everyone pisses off.”

“What have you been up to these last few years?” I asked that, when all I wanted to know was how she’d turned up in such a state on my doorstep. Now she looked in some semblance of control, I was finding it hard to believe that I’d seen her like that, in extremis.

“It felt like I was being followed. No, that’s not right, it felt like I was being hunted. I had to keep moving or I felt I’d be consumed by something so big I couldn’t even see it. Just an aspect of it, I saw, usually in sleep, moving furiously, like an engine part well-oiled, pistoning and thrashing around. It belonged to something that was vast and after me. Hungry for me.” She took another drink of coffee, then reached over and tapped a man in a vest and combat trousers on the shoulder. Asked him for a cigarette. After he’d lit it for her, she turned back to me and spoke around a mouthful of bluish smoke.

“I left Warrington just after we finished . . . after you finished with me. I got a job with a waste disposal firm in Keighley.”

“Keighley? Why Keighley, of all places? Middle of nowhere.”

“No, I was the middle of nowhere. Anywhere, everywhere else was a grip on something real. I was on Temazepam by this time, for my depression and insomnia but it wasn’t working. The doctor gave me Prozac, and that was better, for a while, until I wanted to do nothing other than sit in front of my window and watch the litter being blown across the street. I kicked all that but it was like the feeling had settled into me and wouldn’t go away, I slept late, ate less, became constipated. I began to appreciate a particular kind of darkness I found in the loft. There was a cat, Marlon, his name was, that would sleep up there. Made his way over the roofs and climbed in through a hole in the eaves. We’d curl up together, flinching whenever a bird’s claws rattled on the tiles. It was almost magical. I felt safe; that thing that was looking for me wouldn’t have me here. It was just me and Marlon and the dark. Holding on to Marlon’s fur kept me real and sane. If he wasn’t there, I think I would have just . . . well . . . ”

“How long were you in Keighley for?” I asked, sensing a dangerous moment of self-disclosure if I let her carry on.

“Not long. I hitched a lift to Scarborough and did some work at one of the hotels. Cleaning rooms in the daytime, serving behind the bar at night. I liked it. Days off, I’d walk along the beach up to the amusement arcades. I met boys there. When it got dark we’d go behind the generators and I’d just let them do what they wanted to me. I went with this really gaunt, ill-looking boy called Felix. He was half Croatian. I sucked him off and when he came—”

“Jesus, Lou—”

“—when he came, there was blood in his semen. He blamed it on me, said I’d infected him—some nonsense like that—and he tried to strangle me. I didn’t fight him off. I was struck by how beautiful he looked in the thin light rising from the harbor behind us. I think he got scared when I smiled at him. He left me alone. I like to believe you were thinking of me at that very moment. My Guardian Angel rescued me with some attention.”

I laughed nervously. I didn’t like anything she was telling me. I was jealous and I was resentful of her for keeping a hold on to me. My letter hadn’t been a cry for reunion, it had been a friendly endeavor to find out what was happening to someone I cared about. But I found myself hooked on her story. “And then?” I asked, my voice dead, resigned.

“I stayed in Scarborough for some time. A year or so. Things changed. I found that I seemed to be waking into thick air. Walking, blinking, breathing—it was all such an effort. Things weren’t right while somehow keeping a surface of normality. I’d see something odd, but everybody else’s reaction would be non-existent and it might be hours or days before I told myself that no, it was not right but by then I’d suspect that it happened at all.”

“What kind of things? What are you talking about, Louise?”

“I’m talking about the skeletons of fish on the beach flopping around, trying to get back into the water. I’m talking about sand castles that didn’t dissolve when the tide touched them. A couple kissing under a streetlamp whose heads melted into each other.”

“Tcha!” I said, rocking back on my seat and attracting a few glances from the punters sitting nearby. She’d drawn me into her story so effectively that this nonsense had spat me out, like a newborn, unable to cope with the sudden influx of normal sensations. I sighed and rubbed my eyes. She wouldn’t give up on it though.

“A dog smoking a pipe. A parrot on a smiling tramp’s shoulder picking his brains from a bleeding eye socket. Burning children playing leapfrog on a lawn.”

“Stop it, Louise.”

“I was there. I saw this happening.”

“In Scarborough? I’ve been to Scarborough. The strangest thing they have there is a ghost train that squirts water at you.”

“Yes. But, although it was Scarborough, it could have been anywhere. I was drawing these things to me. I was in some kind of midway. A lost soul.”

I necked my coffee. I could feel myself bristling under her expectant gaze. She’d always been like this, pushing the envelope of provocation and gauging my reaction till I exploded. “If you’re trying to make me feel guilty for finishing with you, you’re doing fine. Not that you’re one to hold a grudge.”

“I don’t blame you for this, Sean. I did at first. I spent all my time thinking of you. Thinking of how our child would have been two, three, four, five. You laughing and having a good time. Fucking lots of women. I played the whole victim thing. I wanted you and hated you in equal measure. I needed you. But then I realized all my misery was externalized, too. It got so bad very quickly that I didn’t even notice things had changed until I started paying attention to the outside world rather than my puffy face in the mirror.

“The coming of daylight seemed to take longer than it ought to in the mornings. I’d see weather forecasts predicting rain or shine but there was a constant haze, like the sun trying to force its way through mist. It never changed. I’d visit my parents and they appeared to talk through me, looking at my face but somehow misdirecting their focus as if they were talking to someone standing behind me. And then this awful sense of something coming, gravitating toward me . . . ”

I noticed that I was holding her hand but I couldn’t recall reaching for her. Her casual referral to her pregnancy had shamed me. I couldn’t say anything.

“And you wrote to me. It was salvation. There was no longer a sense of me being consigned to limbo. Does this sound silly to you? Because there are others. I saw one or two, drifting like me, pale and withdrawn like flames that can’t quite catch upon what they’re supposed to be burning. People who were dismissed from somebody’s life. People who had an umbilicus disconnected. God knows what would have happened to me if you hadn’t written. I think I’d have faded away. Winked out. There’s still something missing. Something I need in order to give me a sense of being replete but I’m buggered if l know what it is.”